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Anthropologist speaking: Most hominids didn't "die out", they just interbred with homo sapiens to the point where their genes became marginalized. In fact, any person of non-African ethnicity has 1-4% Neanderthal DNA (which means Africans are actually the "purist race", take that 19th century!). Homo Sapien's main claim to success is that it was able to perpetuate and evolve cultural tradition, so every successive generation was able to make better spear heads, fire-starting equipment, etc. To contrast, a previous group of hominids (whose name escapes me right now) were insanely successful across Africa and Eurasia with their own spearheads, but they lacked the ability to socialize and improve opun design, and thus were out-competed by Homo Erectus, Homo Neanderthalis, and eventually Homo Sapiens.

Anthropologist speaking: Most hominids didn't "die out", they just interbred with homo sapiens to the point where their genes became marginalized. In fact, any person of non-African ethnicity has 1-4% Neanderthal DNA (which means Africans are actually the "purist race", take that 19th century!). Homo Sapien's main claim to success is that it was able to perpetuate and evolve cultural tradition, so every successive generation was able to make better spear heads, fire-starting equipment, etc. To contrast, a previous group of hominids (whose name escapes me right now) were insanely successful across Africa and Eurasia with their own spearheads, but they lacked the ability to socialize and improve opun design, and thus were out-competed by Homo Erectus, Homo Neanderthalis, and eventually Homo Sapiens.

anthropology is cool but i never really took the time to read much of it. are there any particularly good anthropology books you know of(aside from jared diamond).

"I'll go," said Chagataev. "But what will I do there? Build socialism?"
"What else?" said the secretary.

Solly, you got that statistic a bit backwards, 1-4% of non-Africans have neanderthal genes, not 1-4% of our DNA, I have looked at this stat dozens of times off hand.

Also, there is some debate about it, some scientists argue that that genes may be much older, from an earlier period of homo sapien neanderthal interaction about 150,000 years ago when we were much more closely related.

Also, their brains were bigger, but they lacked certain thought processes we take for granted. For example, no neanderthal food storage has ever been found, it is believed they ate all their food immediately, never storing it, which is a huge disadvantage.

Finally, it is thought that Neanderthals could actually speak well, even better than us, the ear canal tune for Neanderthals is much thicker and larger, indicating that they talked more than us.

Their extinction is most likely from our environmental pressure, out competing them in the warming post-peak-ice age environment, us being the faster and taller hominid, better suited to the changing environment.

anthropology is cool but i never really took the time to read much of it. are there any particularly good anthropology books you know of(aside from jared diamond).

IDK, most of my study so far has been in cultural stuff. There's literally hundreds - thousands of ethnographies and case studies out there that would blow your mind. Some of the coolest, I think, are the ones from the American Southwest, the best of which I can think of is Tewa World. That book has some crazy cool cosmology. Another one that kind of struck me is Knauft's The Gebusi, but apparently it's $46 on Amazon, what the fuck? It's, like, 100 pages.

As for some physical anthropology stuff, I always found primatology to be the most interesting. Maybe something by Jane Goodall? If you're interested in early hominids you're better off looking through archaeology, anthroplogists suck at concluding anything about early man (as evidenced by this thread).

anyway, I'm reading "Wisdom of Psychopaths"
it's about the dysfunction being more of a evolutionary trait in all humans, but is more prominent in certain people (like doctors, lawyers, "good" soldiers, etc) and more interesting stuff.